commitment

Mark Sanborn is an author and speaker from whom I have gleaned much wisdom over the years. One of the things he has said is, “You acquire much of the thinking, mannerisms, and characteristics of the people you are around.” It happens without any conscious effort on our part. Look at your circle of friends. I’ll bet if you tried, you would identify habits, dialects, and preferences you did not have before you began hanging out with them.

It’s what bonds people together in a unique way. Relationships thrive or die on whether this form of bonding occurs or not. Of course, not all the traits you graft on to yourself will be positive. There is as much opportunity to be worse for knowing your friends than there is to be better for it, so choose your friends wisely.

I think we sometimes get so busy trying to create heaven on earth we forget to build God’s Kingdom on earth. There is a difference between building a life full of comfort, security, and excess and building the Kingdom of God. When I look around my country and see the lives of Christians looking no different from those who have rejected Jesus, I can’t help but feel we’ve misunderstood the point.

Building God’s Kingdom has nothing to do with Kingdom building in the traditional sense. We build the Kingdom of God by sacrificing the very things we would use to build our own kingdoms. When you look at your own life, does the evidence point to building the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of you?

I’ve seen a quote sprinkled around the internet, not sure of its original source, but it says, “The devil knows your name but calls you by your sin. God knows your sin but calls you by your name.” This is an astute and accurate description of the difference between the way we are seen by God and the adversary. God loves everything about you.

He created you to look like Him and is so intimately familiar with you He knows the number of hairs on your head (Luke 12:6-7). Satan, on the other hand, only knows who you are. In fact, the closer you draw to God, the more aware of you the devil becomes. He knows who you are, but he hates you because of whose you are.

Where is the passion among followers of Jesus today? Where is the urgency of knowing the scores of people we associate with daily are doomed to spend eternity in Hell, forever separated from their Creator? We say we love Jesus and claim He is Lord of our life, but where is the evidence? By my observation, most Christians today are focused more on their own success and retirement plans than they are on the starving masses, enslaved children, and desperate lost souls in the world.

Everything is assumed to be someone else’s problem. We’ll leave those things to the professionals and their organizations. All the while, it is we who are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus, a directive we conveniently ignore.

I recently had the epiphany that personal development is useless. As a professed adherent to constant personal development in my own life, the revelation took me by surprise. I am always looking for ways to better myself, do things more effectively, and am consistently refining my habits and disciplines. But ultimately, personal development is useless because it starts with myself. I am a terribly flawed human being. We all are.

Nothing that comes from us will ever improve ourselves in a significant way. We are building on a flawed foundation (our flawed selves). While personal development may be useless, God-development is where the true answers are found. If we start with perfection, we have something worth building upon.